Not that this helps you at all at this point in your project but it seems that the PhysX physics engine is free for commercial use as long as you're using it on a pc. I tried getting Newton to work for me but couldn't get rid of memory leaks and struggled through some of the tutorials due to lack of documentation. So I switched to PhysX and had no problems getting everything to work.

PhysX has at least 100 different tutorials on their site and is memory leak free! (for me at least). Everything is in openGL but that's easily interchangeable. I'm not sure about speed but seeing the commercial games created with it, it most likely runs fast enough.

I did have some questions about your texturing if you don't mind.

1. How many different textures and what sizes do you use for the buildings?

2. What kind of mapping do you do for the textures on the buildings? I feel like doing a uvw unwrap on a mostly rectangular object is too complex but then with windows and other decorations, I can't get it to work any other way. Would making the windows and other decoration separate objects and texture them separately be the way to go?

Not that this helps you at all at this point in your project but it seems that the PhysX physics engine is free for commercial use as long as you're using it on a pc. I tried getting Newton to work for me but couldn't get rid of memory leaks and struggled through some of the tutorials due to lack of documentation. So I switched to PhysX and had no problems getting everything to work.

PhysX has at least 100 different tutorials on their site and is memory leak free! (for me at least). Everything is in openGL but that's easily interchangeable. I'm not sure about speed but seeing the commercial games created with it, it most likely runs fast enough.

Dan

It seems to me you are frustrated with newton and you are projecting your problems into the engine,
but what you are saying do not really reflect the reality.
http://www.physicsengine.com/links.html

PhysX is a very good engine, but for Physx to be good Netwon do not have to be bad.
Newton SDK is written in openGL too.
I did not have those problems you are talking about.
Maybe you just do not understand how the engine works, but that does means other people have the same problems.

Oh, I'm not saying that the engine is bad. It obviously can do what it's supposed to do. But for me, somebody that's never used a physics engine before, the tutorial documentation just doesn't explain everything. There are often lines of code added with no comment on what they do. But you are correct, it's the fact that I don't understand the engine and that's why it frustrated me.

Now I'm using PhysX. I read the tutorials, everything was explained fully and I was able to incorporate it into my engine without a problem. That is why I am recommending it.

Ah yes I've actually implemented Ageia/PhysX into my game engine as soon as they announced it was free for commercial use...it seems to be the most powerful SDK out there, and their Rocket demo was amazing...

Though I ended up going back to Newton after spending a few days with PhysX...I just prefered Newton, and the way everything works with it. If you weren't already so happy with PhysX I'd recommend giving Newton another shot...but hey, to each his own.

You have to be careful with Newton, it is quite unforgiving with memory leaks, etc...if you're not doing something right you'll know about it fast

Especially vehicles, it was a long standing memory leak about a year ago, where I wasn't actually freeing the tires associated with each vehicle before deleting the vehilce body+joint just because I didn't know that I had to.

Anyways I love Newton, if I had to switch physics libs I would def. go with PhysX, and I might for my next game, who knows.

Also you should note that Newton has always been totally free and is being mostly developed by 1 guy, Julio. PhysX used to have a 50k price tag, and still does for console/crossplatform apps.

Anyways to your question about buildings, I usually start with a reference photo and build the details out of that...though it depends on the type of building really. I don't unwrap the meshes, I texture each tri/face by hand in MS3D. I use a single 1024x1024 or 512x512 texture for each building. Also I use a 1024x1024 texture atlas of many small textures for the interiors.

Lemme know if you have any more quesitons.

- Danny_________________I run this place.
"Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked
him a question something like "which ontological urban paridigm most influenced your design of the simulator,
the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?"
He replied, "I just kind of optimized for game play."